Journal
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PRODUCTION RESEARCH
Volume 55, Issue 24, Pages 7276-7301Publisher
TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD
DOI: 10.1080/00207543.2017.1338779
Keywords
flexible manufacturing systems; serial lines; unreliable machines; product-mix; throughput and bottleneck analysis; performance portrait
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Funding
- National Institute of Standards and Technology [70NANB16H017]
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This paper pursues two goals: (a) Define a class of widely used in practice flexible manufacturing systems, referred to as Multi-Job Production (MJP) and formulate industrially motivated problems related to their performance. (b) Provide initial results concerning some of these problems pertaining to analysis of the throughput and bottlenecks of MJP serial lines as functions of the product-mix. In MJP systems, all job-types are processed by the same sequence of manufacturing operations, but with different processing time at some or all machines. To analyse MJP with unreliable machines, we introduce the work-based model of production systems, which is insensitive to whether single-or multi-job manufacturing takes place. Based on this model, we investigate the performance of MJP lines as a function of the product-mix. We show, in particular, that for the so-called conflicting jobs there exists a range of product-mixes, wherein the throughput of MJP is larger than that of any constituent job-type manufactured in a single-job regime. To characterise the global behaviour of MJP lines, we introduce the Product-Mix Performance Portrait, which represents the system properties for all product-mixes and which can be used for operations management. Finally, we report the results of an application at an automotive assembly plant.
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